


The Spinner

by aadarshinah



Series: The Doctor and The Spinner [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, F/M, Gen, Time Lord Rose Tyler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 18:32:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16816138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aadarshinah/pseuds/aadarshinah
Summary: When Rose Tyler looked into the TARDIS, the TARDIS also looked into her. She became Bad Wolf, but she remembered being much, much more."The Parting of The Ways" AU.





	The Spinner

**Author's Note:**

> It has been a long, long time since I wrote fic... and also a long, long time since words just flowed like this. I have a weakness for Time Lord!Rose, and my brain decided this was how I got her. Enjoy.

_The Looms were meant to be a punishment. She was the greatest geneticist Gallifrey had ever seen, surpassing even the right honored inventors of the Looms themselves, and as punishment she was to tend the Looms for five thousand years - a glorified nursemaid for children who were never given the chance to be children at all._

_Punishment? She turns it into a badge of honor instead. She smiles and nods and holds her tongue and becomes The Spinner, the Weaver of Fate, the Needle of Destiny, the Thread-Mother, and lets them forget she’d ever been anything else at all._

Rose clutches at her head. "It hurts. It hurts so much. Why didn't it stop? You said you would stop."

_It was beautiful. The Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the Continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, the Citadel of the Time Lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe, looking down on the galaxies below. Sworn never to interfere, only to watch._

_And watch The Spinner did as child after child born of her Looms was stolen from the arms of their genetic donors and forced to stand in front of the Untempered Schism. She watched as child after child was broken, inspired, maddened, or smart enough to flee from the gaping hole of reality some mad idiot thought it was a brilliant idea to expose their children_ \- Her children! - _to without training or protection or even a hand to hold._

_She would stop them. She would protect them all._

"No. No no no no no," the man - The Doctor! _Her Doctor!_ How could she ever forget her Doctor? - says, golden swirls of regeneration energy already dancing in his eyes, almost bright enough to hide the wide, shining panic in them. "That doesn't make sense. I absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex. You should be safe. One of us should get to live."

 _They came for her shortly after graduation, when her timelines have settled enough for someone looking to guess at what she might do in some possible future. They dragged her before The Lord President and the entire High Council and told her her future crimes were so terrible that she could never be allowed to commit them. They sentenced her to work the Looms - where her knowledge of genetics can be put to use in a_ useful _manner, they tell her - to never leave the spinning rooms unless its to place a genetic recombinant into one of its donor's arms._

"I remember..." Rose whispers, then screams as the pain drives her to her knees. "They punished me before I could commit my crime, putting me in the position where I would want to commit it in the first place. They created the causal loop without even realizing it. Not brilliant, that - from their standpoint at least. Could nobody on The High Council divine timelines correctly?"

The Doctor's regeneration energy _stutters_. "Rose, you're not making any sense."

"Don't you remember?" she asks, looking up at him. At least, she thinks she's looking up at him. Her head is spinning and everything's screaming and there might even be tears in her eyes. "I couldn't take it. I tried to save them - I tried to close the Schism, but they caught me. You tried to plead for me, but you were already in exile, the stuffed shirts in funny hats weren't listening to you any more than they were listening to me."

_And then came The Time War._

_She didn't want to- They pulled her from the dungeons, old and frail and refusing to regenerate because she couldn't watch them continue to destroy her children and call it a blessing, and forced her to work the Looms. They needed soldiers for the War, beautiful little children they forced her to twist into Nightmares and Travesties to flight for their Could-have-been King, claiming that his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres wasn't enough for victory. So many beautiful babies born only to die hours after coming off the Loom, never knowing life at all._

_She couldn't take it. She couldn't stop it. She couldn't even fight, so she ripped out everything that made her Gallifreyan, everything that made her a Time Lord - all her knowledge and hope and future regenerations - and threw it into the Perversion Forge._

_The Spinner expected to die. Actually, she expected to be erased from existence, but she called it dying because it made it seem less frightening. But she didn't. Instead, it rewrote her biology, changed every cell in her body, and sent her across space and time to a place she could live out her life in peace, away from the War. It was still death, but it was a kind death._

_She forgot that she had ever woven fate. She forgot that she had ever run through fields of golden flowers beneath burnt orange skies, weaving fresh blooms into her hair while realities burned around her. She forgot the recombinants torn from her arms to be raised by genetic donors who saw nothing more than the continuation of their legacies instead of the beautiful, unique, brilliant, squalling potential in each and every child._

_She even forgot him._

He whispered her name. Not the one that she had taken, but the one he had given her when they were both too young for The Academy, playing in the pale blue snow in the shadow Mount Solace, helping to pick golden flowers for her to weave into her crown. " _Arkytior_."

"Yes."

"But how?"

"I..." The pounding in her head is less, but fresh tears spill down her cheeks. "I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me. And she remembered who I was even when I couldn't. You could remove the Vortex, Doctor, but not the memories."

"Arkytior," he repeats. He takes a step towards her, eyes full of awe and pain and love and regeneration energy.

"Stay back," Rose - The Spinner, the Thread-Mother, the Weaver of Fate, the Betrayer of Time, Arkytior of Arcadia - shouted, scrambling backward. "You're burning with regeneration energy and I'm still radiating Huon particles. If we touch before the process finishes, we risk blowing a hole in the space-time continuum the size of-"

The Doctor finishes the calculations before she can remember enough of her trans-temporal mechanics to even start. "Belgium. The exact size of Belgium, actually. That's a bit of a letdown. You'd think between the two of us we'd at least manage Papua New Guinea."

Rose laughs - an ugly, watery, hiccuping, sort of laugh that earns the brightest smile she's ever seen on The Doctor, in any of his incarnations.

He moves to the center of the console room, away from anything delicate or flammable. "So long to this daft old face then."

"I'll see you soon. Promise."

"Fantastic," he says as he lets the regeneration energy overcome him. "Absolutely fantastic."

Golden light burns floods out of his body, bright and brilliant and utterly uncontrolled. There must still be traces of Huon particles on his skin from that kiss - _that kiss!_ that was hardly the only way he could have removed the Time Vortex, though certainly the most pleasant for both of them -because he screams, and that's not normal, and-

-and the temperature in the console room ratchets up ten degrees, and there's sweat mixing in the tear tracks on her face, and she can't lose him again-

_"Will we ever see each other again?" she had asked just days before graduation, clutching his hand. They're in The Academy gardens, in a hidden grotto full of golden forty-first century Earth roses that even the caretakers have forgotten about, and she's never been more scared in her life. The Untempered Schism was nothing compared to the thought of losing him._

_"Of course," The Doctor had said - because he was always The Doctor, always that promise, even before he made it. "All of time and space for us to hide in- they couldn't keep us apart if they tried."_

_"Promise?"_

_"Promise._ "

-and then the light finally starts to fade as the regeneration settles, and Rose dashes the sweat and tears from her eyes. His face is younger than she's seen it since they were both children together, so young and different and unable to understand why their classmates just _accepted_ the things their teachers told them instead of wanting to see the universe with their own eyes, but it's still him. Still her Doctor.

She laughs again, all hiccuping snot, and his eyes - brown now - snap towards her.

"Hello. Okay. Ooo, new teeth. That's weird. So, where was I? Oh, that's right. Arkytior."

**Author's Note:**

> I do not know if there will be more of this. Maybe. We'll see. Depends on if the inspiration keeps coming. I also apologize for any canon I may have offended in the process of writing this fic. My old-school Who is a little weak.


End file.
